Our Approach
Our Investment Approach Is Different
- -We do a retirement bucket analysis. We then work with you to implement a risk appropriate, tax efficient investment strategy for each of the retirement buckets.
- -This integrates the risk in your investment portfolio with your goals and time horizon. It helps protect money needed for short and intermediate term goals from large losses and allows you to sleep better at night.
- -Our investment strategy is very flexible. During low risk periods after a major downturn when stocks are cheap and the long term trend turns up, we allocate more to equities to help grow your portfolio. During high risk periods when both leverage and valuations are high and the long term trend turns down, we allocate less to equities and may shift totally to cash and short term high quality bonds or use some hedges.
- - Focused Wealth Strategies anchors portfolios with dividend growth stocks that we sell only if our long term sell rules trigger. We then wait to buy them back until they get much cheaper and their long term trend turns back up. Our goal is to earn you strong growing dividend income. This dividend income is important in case stocks go sideways for another 7 years to 8 years.
- - We allocate a good portion of the portfolio to a well diversified portfolio of ETFS that includes significant allocations to real assets, growth stocks, and foreign bonds and stocks to help protect your purchasing power. We use a longer term buy and sell discipline to help us know when the long term trend is changing and it is time to buy or sell. Our goal is to stay invested throughout a cyclical bull market, but switch to Treasury bonds before the damage is too great in a bear market.
- Since bull markets last longer and we wait to get defensive until the long term trend turns down, we avoid triggering a lot of trades over time in the core portfolio. We do incur trading costs when we rebalance your portfolio periodically to match your retirement buckets and to make needed changes if the risk with a particular asset class outweighs the upside potential. Trading costs are important, but safety trumps costs.
- - The combination of diversification and active risk management allows us to allocate more to growth oriented investments than we could normally afford to since capital preservation is our priority.
- - We use a momentum ETF strategy for the explore portfolio, which we normally allocate at least 5% to. We invest money you don't need for 10 years or more. The explore portfolio normally switches to bonds during major down turns.
- - We customize our approach to fit the risk tolerance, goals, and time horizon of each client.
No one can perfectly time the market. However, to us, the logic is simple. Using active risk management gives us a better chance of protecting both your principal and your purchasing power.